I’m a Soylent customer in Canada and a few minutes ago received an email signed by founder/CEO Rob Rhinehart. “The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) recently informed us that our products do not meet a select few of the CFIA requirements for a “meal replacement.” Although we feel strongly that these requirements do not reflect the current understanding of human nutritional needs, … we are unable to ship any additional product to our Canadian warehouses or sell Soylent to our Canadian customers until this is resolved.”

A copy of the full email, with a FAQ, is at https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005267426 . Although the email says “we have posted a detailed FAQ to share all the information we have at our disposal”, the FAQ does not say which Canadian government requirements Soylent isn’t meeting. I presume that Soylent has too little (or none), or too much, of certain things to qualify as a meal replacement, and that there is no other category that the CFIA can/will reclassify it into.

While I’m certainly curious about which requirements aren’t being met, really it doesn’t matter in practical terms to me since the bottom line is that I can no longer legally buy Soylent. I imagine that either the Canadian requirements or the Soylent formulation will need to change, and either of those would likely take a long time.

I’m okay for now (fortunately I bought recently) but when I’m about to run out I will be looking for a grey-market source, e.g. American individuals willing to sell me some and ship it to me. I don’t know what the chances would be of shipments’ getting blocked at the border, but I’ve bought supplements from an American company that advises buying a maximum of 3 bottles at a time to prevent border issues, which is a bit worrisome.

Yep. This is some bullshit. The Reddit thread on this is proposing that the fat content is a few percentage points too high for Health Canada’s liking.

It blows my mind that Ensure and Boost are totally cool as meal replacements despite being woefully unbalanced, but Soylent is somehow unhealthy. I have to wonder in what decade the CFIA regulations were drafted.

I concur with making this issue as public as possible, the power of social media has made itself very apparent, for better or for worse. Now is the time to use it for better. While it may be extreme to say that this situation is a death sentence for many of us, it isn’t very far from the truth of the matter. I truly hope this situation can be resolved quickly, as this affects my life at its very core. I will be writing the CFIA later, and have already made a public post calling out the CFIA on social media, I suggest everyone do the same. If enough of our voices are heard, we can make a difference here.

Hopefully the order I just placed makes it before the warehouse gets cleaned out by everyone. If not, guess I’ll have to try some of these old boxes of powder I have until those run out… After that, who knows, guess I’ll bend to the CFIA’s will and go back to eating McDonald’s and Boost, because evidently that is healthy enough to exist here.

Checked out the first reshipper listed in Google. $59.95 to reship the standard 2x Soylent shipping box from their USA warehouse to Vancouver. Think I’d prefer to pickup in Point Roberts myself, since I’m already going there occasionally (albeit very occasionally up to now).

If anyone is looking for a good package service there, check out InOutParcel. Same price as everyone else but it’s automated and there’s no lines.

Checked out the first reshipper listed in Google. $59.95 to reship the standard 2x Soylent shipping box from their USA warehouse to Vancouver.

Oh, I know that - I actually used a reshipper for Soylent long before it was available in Canada, back in the oil bottle days. What I meant was, will they still sell to Canadian accounts if we use an American address. Just making sure, even though I don’t see why not. At any rate, that was answered on Reddit. (it’s OK, no worries) Much more info over there.

Right now, I’m worried that they won’t be able to comply without reformulating and they instead totally abandon Canada. I’m also wondering how this happened if RL did their due dilligence when coming to Canadaland in the first place; to my knowledge, the rules haven’t changed. Perhaps something to do with NAFTA renegotiation or some crap like that, IDK.

Can soylent not just change it’s wording rather than the ingredients? I don’t care if it’s called a meal replacement or a dietary supplement or a high cal beverage… I will use it just the same. Thinking of switching to Biolent if things don’t improve but have yet to try it. I do well on high protein diets so like that there is a keto option.

Luckily for me, I’m a Canadian studying in the US, but this regulatory BS still makes me livid. We Canadians need to first identify those standards that aren’t being met (Conor can you specify what they are?) and petition the CFIA if we find them to be scientifically unsound (https://www.change.org/).